


all hope abandon

by morningstar921



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Aziraphale also hates the 14th century, Bubonic Plague, Caring Aziraphale (Good Omens), Crowley Hates the 14th Century (Good Omens), Gabriel (Good Omens) - Freeform, Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, Hurt/Comfort, Miracles, Peasant Aziraphale (Good Omens), Plague Doctor Crowley (Good Omens), Pre-Slash, Sick Crowley (Good Omens), Sickfic, aka that thing we call the ineffable plan, hereditary enemies make the best friends, hint: it's fondness, if you'd like, is this fondness or is this a stomach ache, questioning faith, stuffy angel that he is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-09
Updated: 2020-04-09
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:08:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23568091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morningstar921/pseuds/morningstar921
Summary: It's the 14th century and the Plague runs rampant through London. It's innocuous enough until the demons start catching it too. Until Crowley catches it."I'm not helping them. This is medical malpractice, angel. Do you really think a few leeches will cure them?"
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 81





	all hope abandon

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from Dante's Inferno

The streets of London are mucky, thickened by shoppers and peddlers crowded between building fronts. Aziraphale steps carefully through the mud and wrinkles his nose. The fourteenth century cannot end soon enough. He is still unable to fathom how the humans regressed so far in so short a period of time. The Romans had left England only a few centuries ago! It had to have been an act of demonic intervention that wiped the slate clean, so to speak. What a shame not even the baths had survived. What Aziraphale wouldn’t give for a nice soak this century. 

A rat scutters across Aziraphale’s shoe. He shudders. He has love for all of Creation, insects and vermin included, but even as impervious as he is he cannot help but shy away from these disease-carrying rodents. 

If only the humans would shudder as he does. Maybe then they’d die a lot less often these days. Someone should tell them, Aziraphale thinks, watching them go about their day in the market carefree, but it is expressly forbidden. Gabriel told him not to intervene -- this isn’t like leprosy back in the day, a quick flashy miracle to cure the poor and unfortunate. And anyway, after that lovely Jesus fellow took center stage, minor miracles had been heavily restricted. One simply could not outdo the Almighty’s son, angel or not. Some things are simply ineffable, or so Aziraphale’s reminder goes. 

Aziraphale stops at one woman’s stall for a loaf of bread. He fishes out of his pocket the appropriate coins, and smiles as he departs for his home just outside the market. He’d have preferred living in one of the neighboring monasteries, but living with the peasants did have its own array of fun. Oh, the gossip they would tell! Far better than anything the monks could have come up with, and certainly filled in the gaps where literature had fallen off the wayside. 

He is just entering his own neighborhood when someone leaves a neighbor’s cottage -- one of the quarantined homesteads, locked down by the plague. It’s one of those ghastly plague doctors with a long narrow cane and a basket of supplies slung over his shoulder. He wears the standard black robes and beaked mask. Good work, those fellows do, but such dreadful attire. As if this whole plague business weren’t frightful enough, Aziraphale thinks.

Before the plague doctor closes off his patient’s home again, he stops to shout into the open doorway, “Oi! Only I do the bloodletting! Don’t go about bleeding each other dry.” Then, under his breath, “Bunch of bloody imbeciles. Don’t know why I even bother with them.”

The man’s voice is rough and Aziraphale startles at the familiarity of it. He’d been wondering where the Demon Crowley had wound up this century. But surely Hell wouldn’t have assigned him as caretaker, right? He almost dismisses the thought entirely until a wisp of fiery red hair slips free from the plague doctor’s coverings. Coincidences are often very much not coincidences at all. 

Aziraphale follows Crowley through the long and winding streets of London, from one neighborhood to the next, until at last Crowley stops at a small cottage on the outskirts of the city. Here, at the threshold of the door, Crowley slips off his mask and untangles the rest of his hair from the hood on his head.

“Crowley!”

The Demon Crowley nearly jumps out of his own skin. “Aziraphale!” he says, turning around sharply. “Were you following me?”

“Well, no, I mean…”

“Bloody bastard,” Crowley says with a toothy grin. “What have you been up to?”

Aziraphale shrugs. “Hardly anything. Upstairs has been rather quiet lately. And you? The last thing I’d expect to see you doing is helping the sick.”

Crowley scowls. “I’m not helping. This is medical malpractice, angel. Do you really think a few leeches will cure them? Very nasty business, this.” He steps into his own home and when he doesn’t shut the door behind him, Aziraphale takes it as an invitation to follow him in.

“The humans don’t know that, though,” Aziraphale says. “They think you’re doing them a lot of good.”

“Don’t say that! Doesn’t matter what they think anyway. They’re still dying, aren’t they?” If Aziraphale catches something glum hanging like a sliver from Crowley’s words, he doesn’t mention it. 

“In droves, yes. Makes you wonder how something so terrible came to be.”

“If you’re suggesting this was Hell’s doing, I’ll assure you it wasn’t. Honestly, we thought it was some new initiative from Upstairs.”

Frowning, Aziraphale takes a step back. Crowley is taking off his robes and determinedly not facing him. “I don’t know how such an idea would enter your head. Nothing about this is very angelic. Nothing at all.”

His robe gone, replaced by a loose cotton shirt and pants, Crowley plops himself down on a chair by the fireplace. Aziraphale remains standing. Crowley’s legs are cocked out to the side, his posture slumped. “I think you’ve forgotten about the ten plagues, angel. Your lot put Egypt through the damn wringer with that one.” A shiver runs noticeably down his spine. “All the locusts and boils and blood… Eugh. Nothing very ‘angelic’ there either, but, well.” He smirks at Aziraphale as if to say, _I’ve got you cornered; history always damns itself._

“I simply don’t know what to say, dear boy.”

“It’s not like Hell wouldn’t like to take credit for all this. All the destruction, all the chaos. Almost feels like it could be the end of the world.”

Aziraphale considers Crowley for a moment: everything he knows of the infernal enemy, everything he knows of Crowley (kids, you can’t kill kids), and something poisonously sweet slips to the forefront of his tongue. Without acknowledging what that might be, Aziraphale hazards to ask, “Would _you_ like to take credit for it?”

Crowley does not respond. Aziraphale changes the subject. “What’s all this with the cane?” he asks, pointing at the stick tossed in with the pile of clothes Crowley had shucked. “Part of the costume, I presume? You can’t possibly have arthritis. Not at your spry age.” 

Crowley looks at it oddly for a moment, seeming to contemplate one answer before settling on another: “Nothing much, really. Use it to poke around the ones with boils and whatnot, so you don’t get infected. Not that it matters much.”

“Since you’re a demon?”

“Since I’m a demon.” Crowley cracks his knuckles and stands up abruptly. “Would you care for a drink, Aziraphale?” He plucks up a bottle of ale from a side table, uncorks it, and takes a large swig of it.

Aziraphale looks around Crowley’s small, one room home. He narrows his eyes. “You don’t have any cups, dear boy.”

“I know.” Crowley holds the bottle out. 

Aziraphale smiles, tight-lipped. “I’m afraid I’ll have to take a rain check. Besides, I have… well, heavenly duties to tend to, I’m afraid.”

“Thought you said Heaven was quiet?”

“An angel’s job is never finished.” Aziraphale chuckles nervously. A true statement, if those orders are to include letting things play out their natural order, no room for divine interventions. 

“I suppose.” Setting aside the ale, Crowley drops himself back into the chair. He makes a shooing motion with his hand. “Well, off you go. I’m sure I’ll be around before long to thwart you again.”

“I’m the one doing the thwarting, dear. The tempting is your job.”

“Apples to oranges, Aziraphale. Apples to oranges.”

* * *

“Angel!”

Aziraphale is at a local pub, a half-eaten plate of mutton in front of him, when Crowley approaches. His heart flutters and his face splits with a grin. "Crowley!” Good Lord, a part of him aches at how cheerful he sounds for a demon. But he can’t help how much he also aches to take the demon up on that rain check for a drink. Work has been so unbearably slow, almost stressfully so. It would be nice to take the edge off. “I was hoping to find you around, dear. If you have a spare moment --”

“You,” Crowley says, sitting down at the bar beside Aziraphale and shoving his plate halfway down the counter, “told me the plague wasn’t your side’s doing.” Crowley speaks through clenched teeth and, behind his dark glasses, his eyes are tight.

Flustered, Aziraphale forgets all thoughts of food (or what he hoped would have been a nice drink with an old… Acquaintance? Coworker? Enemy-in-arms?). “Yes?” he says, and immediately resents his hesitance. Gabriel had made no mention of any earthly plagues in the plan and certainly nothing of any infernal plagues either. The order for withdrawal of intervention could hardly be classified as personal fault in the matter, either. Aziraphale clears his conscience and looks the Demon Crowley straight in the eyes.

Crowley stares back just as determinedly. His eyes are unnerving, hard and unblinking. “Then explain to me why my lot’s dropping like flies.”

“From the plague?”

“From the -- yes, angel, from the plague! What else would it be?”

“I’m hardly the expert on demonic illness. Besides, I thought demons couldn’t get sick.”

Rolling his eyes, Crowley says, “Makes this bloody mess a little suspicious then, doesn’t it?” When Aziraphale does not respond, he steamrolls ahead. “Management’s issued a whole recall back to Hell.”

It’s enough to send Aziraphale reeling. “A recall? What a waste of agents! You can’t do much tempting sitting around Downstairs -- Not that you ever should or that I’d want you to, but… Well hold on, then what are you still doing here? Shouldn’t you have left by now?” The part of Aziraphale glad to see Crowley flares up again like a bad rash. To think, that the demon might have stuck around to say goodbye. How flattering.

Crowley grunts. “Earth is my dominion. Can’t afford a _total_ recall, they said. Have to leave one demon lest the whole place be overrun by goodwill and all that. Besides, my lot is no fun. I think I’d lose my mind down there.”

“If you say so, dear.” So Crowley’s decision to stay wasn’t entirely by choice, then. Aziraphale tears his eyes away from Crowley and stares at his lap. He adds quietly, “Please do be careful. This plague is a nasty business.”

Running a hand through his hair -- Aziraphale looks up just in time to see the slight tremble coursing through it -- Crowley pushes away from the bar counter. “Oh, trust me, angel. I know. I’ve got a front row seat.”

Aziraphale catches Crowley’s wrist as he attempts to leave. “Do stay for a moment, will you? I’ve heard they have an excellent fish plate here.” 

“Make it something alcoholic and you’ve got a deal.” Crowley pulls up a stool next to Aziraphale and waves down the bartender. They spend a good deal of time in the pub, far longer than Aziraphale intended, and when they part ways a few hours later, he is warm and happy and drunk.

* * *

The neighbors a few houses down from Aziraphale are all dead within the week. The corpses are carried out first. They’re carted to the city limits with all the other dead piling up around London and deposited in mass graves. The looters and the unfortunate alike pilfer through what is left in the house. Aziraphale watches them carry out spare clothes and cloths of food and anything else an empty house has no need of.

He does not see Crowley in all this time, nor does he see him the week after. Aziraphale paces wall to wall, worrying at his hands and rearranging the few manuscripts he’s recovered this century. It is not uncommon for Crowley to up and vanish even in the best of times. It’s what he does. A transient one, he is, in appearance and movement. 

But there’s still that horrid plague about, and Aziraphale’s chest does a strange, queasy flip at the thought of Crowley alone, dying in the middle of the street -- Crowley alone, covered head to foot and hip to hip in swollen boils -- Crowley alone, dead and not discorporated -- Crowley alone, Crowley alone, Crowley alone...

Aziraphale is out the door and down the street in a flash of angelic fright.

All along the way he worries over the possibilities. Could this plague, whatever it is, even actually kill a demon? Things that kill humans should only discorporate a demon. Only a spritz of holy water or a rare smiting should be able to take a demon from this world. Crowley’s little cottage appears in sight and Aziraphale breaks into a sprint. Then again, he hadn’t considered the possibility of Crowley falling ill at all. He is treading foreign territory; the unfamiliarity burns worse the deepest scorch of hellfire 

Aziraphale knocks on Crowley’s door. “Crowley! Crowley, open up!” There is no answer. A sharp wind knocks against the side of the house and Aziraphale shivers. Voice caught in a chatter, he says, “I command thee, foul fiend, open this door immediately!” And it breaks his heart to have to have to blast the door down, but Crowley still will not answer, and --

The door swings open as Aziraphale winds up his fist. “Hey, hey, hey!” Crowley shouts, throwing up his hands to block his face. His voice is faint and hoarse. “I was sleeping! And what’s with the fist, eh? Gonna punch my door down? It’d have been easier to miracle it open.”

“I, uh, yes, but…”

“Come on in, angel.” Crowley yawns and makes enough room for Aziraphale to squeeze through the doorway before closing the door. “Take the chair.” Crowley settles onto a narrow pallet, his back against the wall. There’s a high color flushed along his cheekbones and a sheen of sweat along his hairline. Coughing once into the crook of his elbow, he says, “So Aziraphale, what brings you back to my humble abode?”

“I was worried,” Aziraphale says softly, brow furrowed at the telltale signs of illness, “that you’d come down with the plague. A bit too late for worry, aren’t I?”

Crowley nods once. “Only a couple days in. I don’t see what’s so bad. A cough? A fever? Nothing I can’t handle --” He chokes off on a coughing fit that leaves him wheezing. Aziraphale looks for a pot of water to hand him. Seeing only that bottle of ale, he sighs and helps Crowley to a few sips.

“Is it just the cough and the fever?”

“No. That’d be too merciful.” Crowley laughs and lifts the hem of his tunic. On the side of his arm, by his armpit, is an inflamed lump. “Can you believe they call them buboes?” He lets go of his tunic and hacks into his arm. “Bloody ridiculous sounding,” he croaks. “I mean, where do they even come up with these things?”

“They’re certainly inventive.” Aziraphale hovers, crouched at Crowley’s side, before deciding to sit fully beside him. “I don’t know if you’d want an angel’s help, or if it’d even be proper,” he starts. 

“Are you offering to be my nurse?” Crowley says. His eyes grow wide and bright. Aziraphale even thinks his slitted pupils might dilate. 

“If you’d like.”

“I can hardly stop you.” Crowley closes his eyes and breathes sharply through another cough. “I think I’d like that, Aziraphale.” Then, quite under his breath, he says, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Aziraphale murmurs, and it’s a secret arrangement between the two.

* * *

Life under quarantine grows thick and stuffy. Aziraphale goes stir crazy within two days. 

“If I promise not to keel over when you turn your back to me, will you please stop this mother hen charade?”

“Hush, Crowley.”

“Did you hear that? I said please. Me, a demon, saying please! That’s gotta mean something, angel.”

It in fact means very little when dealing with an agitated angel. 

“I’m worried about you, dear.”

“And now I’m worried about you. Seriously, Aziraphale, I think you might give yourself an aneurysm.”

“Angels don’t get aneurysms.”

“Yeah, I know that, it was a joke. Here -- if I tell you to run to the market for more ale, will that get you out of the house? You’re wearing a rut in my floor with all your pacing.”

Aziraphale pinches his nose and sighs. “Only if I must.”

“Consider it an order, then.” Crowley tries to sit up, tries to put on an act of wellness, and collapses under the effort. There are more lumps gathering on his body and his voice sounds like he’s choked on gravel. It’s a miracle he manages to speak coherently at all with the waves of fever rushing over him.

Aziraphale takes a wet rag to Crowley’s forehead one last time before getting to his feet, slipping on his shoes, and heading for the door. “I won’t be gone for long,” he says.

“Take however long you want, angel. S’not like I’m going anywhere.” Crowley’s chest seizes with another cough when Aziraphale leaves. A pang strikes the angel’s heart as if it were his own body under attack. 

Miracling up a bit of coinage, Aziraphale sprints to the market and back in record time. He does not stop to acknowledge any of the people he’s grown acquainted to these past couple of years. Oh, he must look like a harried fright, but he doesn’t care. He all but kicks down Crowley’s door with a couple bottles of ale under his arms. “I’m back,” he announces to the small house. He receives no response. Crowley is on the pallet where Aziraphale left him, curled on his side with his back to Aziraphale. His breathing is slow but ragged. Aziraphale thinks he’s asleep.

He sets the ale down quietly and takes back his vigil at Crowley’s side. Crowley looks so calm and tender asleep like this. One could almost forget what he really is, Aziraphale thinks, and hates himself for thinking so at all. Such a tender boy while awake, too.

The demon’s hair is shorn again. He wonders when that happened. So much happens in between meetings, so much and not enough. Crowley’s hair is mid-length and fanned out around his head, sweat-soaked and grimy but still that brilliant red color. Aziraphale dares to slip his finger into it. He threads a lock between his fingers, rubs his thumb in slow circles at the nape of Crowley’s neck. 

Then Crowley groans and Aziraphale stills. “I’m sorry,” he says hurriedly. “I didn’t mean to impose--” But it’s not Aziraphale’s hand in his hair that startled Crowley. When Crowley rolls onto his back, Aziraphale sees the bloody mess of Crowley’s face, the flow streaming from his nose. “Oh, dear boy…”

Crowley coughs harshly and a spray of blood passes his lips. He makes a strangled sound low in his throat, his lungs stuttering against the blood in his throat. Aziraphale claps him on the back until the coughing ceases. “You’re back,” Crowley croaks. He is too tired to even open his eyes. He coughs again, short and sharp, and there is more blood dark and ruddy on his lips.

Without thinking, Aziraphale lifts Crowley up and presses the demon’s back to his chest. Crowley is even lighter and spindlier than Aziraphale imagined. He wraps his arms around Crowley and rests his chin atop that fiery-red head. Their bodies fit together snugly. “Don’t ask me to leave again.” His voice does not waver but it sounds waterlogged even to his own ears. “Don’t, because I won’t.” 

“What, no please?”

“I’m not begging, I’m demanding.”

“Stubborn old angel.”

“Wily old demon.” 

A pound of tension seems to sink from Crowley’s bones when Aziraphale raises a hand to comb through his hair again. Aziraphale closes his own eyes. Listening to the sound of Crowley’s breathing drop off into something like peaceful sleep, he comes the closest he’s ever come to napping himself.

* * *

Everything always gets worse before it gets better, but somehow Aziraphale never thought it could get _this_ bad.

The darkened black of necrosis creeps along Crowley’s toes and fingers, his bones stiffening into mangled positions. The tip of his nose, too, begins to show telltale signs of rot. 

“I suppose they call it the Black Death for a reason,” Crowley says, and Aziraphale hates how nonchalant he is about this whole thing -- about _dying._

The rot shows no signs of stopping. It doesn’t stop for the humans, so why should it stop for a demon? Aziraphale wraps Crowley’s hands and feet in bandages anyway and, when Crowley falls into fitful sleep each night, the angel kneels at the foot of his pallet and prays for his recovery. Each prayer is met like stone against water, sunken and lost. 

Early one morning, when Aziraphale is making porridge in a pot over the fireplace for Crowley to eat -- and he _will_ eat it, if Aziraphale has anything to say about it -- Crowley turns over on his side, wipes the bleariness from his eyes, and mutters hoarsely to the ceiling, “This is what I deserve.”

Aziraphale almost burns his hand in the fire. “What,” he says. He must have misheard.

Crowley wriggles on the pallet as if trying to shed his skin. “I didn’t mean to say that out loud.”

“What did you say?”

“You wouldn’t want to hear it.”

“You’re right, but you’re going to tell me anyway.”

Crowley closes his eyes and hunches into himself, balancing his head on the nubs of his hands. His nose looks more like a lump of coal than a nose now. He says, voice garbled against the ridges this disease has raised on his chest, “I was cast into eternal damnation. Things were getting easy, too easy. This is my punishment renewing itself.”

“Don’t say that.” The porridge starts to bubble over. Aziraphale takes it off the fire, plunks it down on the floor, and sits himself squarely in front of Crowley. He wants to grab the demon in both hands and shake him against the wall. This body, a principality’s body, was shaped for hard action. Though he molded it for pretty words instead, the instinct is all the same.

Crowley laughs low. It is the first ugly sound Aziraphale has ever heard him make. “She always had a cruel sense of humor. I can respect that.”

“Stop. Stop it right now!” Aziraphale feels his eyes burning and if Crowley would just look up, maybe he would know too. “Don’t you ever say these things to me again. I won’t have it.”

“The proof is in the pudding, angel. Stop denying it.”

Balling his fists tight, Aziraphale snarls, “The Plan is not for you, a demon, to know! I am an angel of the lord, and if I say you don’t deserve this, then that is Her word!”

The way that Crowley deflates and turns on his back to stare numbly at the ceiling, it looks as though all the fight has gone out of him. A small snake’s bite is always more vicious than its tail though: “Oh, this is definitely Her Plan, I’ve just stopped questioning it. I’ve questioned Her all my life and it’s why I’m here, like this, and you’re not.”

Now Aziraphale jabs a finger under Crowley’s chin and twists the demon’s head to look at him. Crowley lowers his gaze but Aziraphale presses on. “Do you really think I’ve never questioned anything? Was giving away that blasted sword not a question of Heaven’s will? Was meeting with you century after century not a question of Heaven’s will? What I’m doing for you now -- is that not a question, either?”

He’s been waiting to Fall for so long, the tension of waiting like a stretched band poised to snap. He knows he is certainly no obedient angel, not like Gabriel or any of the others. Watching Adam and Eve expelled from the Garden, watching Sodom fall, watching millions drown in the Flood, had all made his heart ache. And watching over Crowley now, a demon kinder than any angel, succumb slowly to death, has made him consider more than once of renouncing his claim to Her grace.

You’re not at all what a demon is supposed to be, Aziraphale thinks. All bark and no bite, kind and quiet behind those dark lenses. His anger turns dark and inward, and he wonders how any Mother could stand to see him burn in sulphur and suffering? How Aziraphale, sinful but short of outright questioning, can live without blame while Crowley cannot. If there truly is a Plan for everything, there must be a reason for this.

Maybe, he thinks, I am being allowed to save him.

The thought does not make any of this easier to bear. It makes it harder, in fact, to think this was all orchestrated from the start, puppetry by an invisible hand. But he grinds his teeth and bears it anyway, smooths the pain from his face as he places both hands on Crowley’s cheeks, and says sweetly, “You’ll just have to trust me, dear.”

Crowley’s cheeks are warmer and redder than his fever. He licks his lips and whispers, “I trust you.” Then, bastard that he is, he says, “Still dying though.”

The tears only just staved off now burst from Aziraphale in one great heaving sob, thicker waters than when the Flood drowned the whole of the earth. “Crowley,” he moans and lays his head on the demon’s chest.

“I’m sorry.” Imagine that: a demon of all creatures apologizing. A tender boy, indeed. Aziraphale bites down on a laugh.

They sit like that, Aziraphale dampening Crowley’s shirt and Crowley’s chest heaving beneath his cheek, until the waterworks run dry and Aziraphale sits up again. His hair is mussed where Crowley rubbed his bandaged hands along his skull.

“Let me try a miracle on you,” Aziraphale says suddenly, and Crowley jerks on the pallet.

“Oh, you’re not joking,” he groans. “And here I thought you wanted me alive.”

Aziraphale shakes his head. “I do. But how has anything I’ve done helped? This is the last thing I have to give to you. Please let me help you.”

“You’ve helped me plenty, angel. And besides, what makes you think this would even work? You’re more likely to smite me.”

“Do you have anything to lose?” The words shock Aziraphale as he utters them. But they seem to be the embers under Crowley’s feet. The demon agrees, if a little hesitantly. A little self-preservation is to be expected. Positively beaming, Aziraphale reaches back for the bowl of porridge he’d abandoned earlier. “Eat some porridge and we can get started.”

“Not hungry.”

“Just eat it. For me.”

“Have you ever once seen me eat?”

“There’s a first time for everything. Now, Crowley: eat it.”

* * *

Crowley’s eyes are screwed up tight, his fists balled up tight at his sides. His entire body is one knotted string of tension. 

Aziraphale shakes his hands loose. “Oh, stop it,” he says. “I haven’t even touched you yet.”

Crowley squints one eye open and scowls. “Well excuse me, but some of us aren’t gluttons for pain.”

“Are you suggesting I am?”

“For my pain, maybe.” Here, Crowley’s mouth twists upwards, wry. 

Swatting Crowley’s arm, Aziraphale settles himself on the floor. “Keep running your mouth like that…” He lets the threat hang in the air, just as wry. It draws a laugh from Crowley. Aziraphale ducks his head, smiling.

“Always knew you had some fighting spirit in you.”

“Yes, yes. Now, dear.” Aziraphale’s expression sobers itself into something solemn. “I need you to stay still for me, okay?” 

Crowley nods.

“I can’t promise it won’t hurt. It probably will, to be honest. But I’ll try my best to --”

“Angel?”

“Yes, Crowley?”

“Just do it.” Crowley’s tongue darts out to lick his chapped lips. “The wait is killing me quicker than this plague.”

Aziraphale lays his hands obediently on Crowley’s chest, one on either side of his heart, and channels healing through his fingertips.

It’s a filtered stream; the power barely glows as it leaches into Crowley’s skin nor is it enough to draw Aziraphale’s wings out either, yet it still hits Crowley like a full-blown smiting. The demon’s vocal cords are shot-through with coughing so his screams hit the air as nothing more than wracking croaks. His body writhes, back arched against the pain like acid in his veins. The tears in his eyes evaporate on his cheeks.

Infernal matter and angelic grace: like water and oil, or fire and holy water. 

It hurts to see Crowley hurt like this. It hurts more than seeing him die slowly, maybe, if only because Aziraphale is the weapon of destruction now. Miracling a demon, he thinks, is like treating a paper cut with amputation. 

But I can’t stand to see him die, he thinks, and banishes doubt from his head (like a good, proper angel). 

The black encroaching on Crowley’s nose begins to fade back into pink skin. A boil on his chest recedes and vanishes completely. Crowley is too busy heaving through the pain to notice, but Aziraphale does, and a startled laugh chatters through his clenched teeth. He holds on for a moment longer before withdrawing his power from Crowley.

“You did wonderful, dear,” he says and laughs again. It worked, it really worked.

Crowley’s eyes are still closed but they’re no longer screwed tight. He lets loose a ragged breath caught in his throat. “Knew it would work.”

“No you didn’t. You were worried I’d kill you.”

“I lied. It’s a demon thing, you wouldn’t get it. You couldn’t kill me. Too soft.”

“Soft! Why, I --” Aziraphale looks to the side, as if trying to gather a suitably hardened experience from thin air. He cannot find one.

“Like I said: soft.”

* * *

The two of them, hereditary enemies only on alternating Tuesdays, fall into a routine. Aziraphale’s own home is long abandoned, left in favor of squatting at Crowley’s. He pretends to himself and to Crowley that it’s for convenience. “You live in the loneliest part of town,” he says. “I’d hardly want to race here and back everyday.”

He leaves Crowley’s place only to go to the market, to fetch small treats for himself and ingredients for the porridge he force feeds the demon. The rest of his days he spends squabbling over minor things like which prophet was the Almighty’s favorite (“She cared for them all equally!” “Sure, you say that, but She didn’t make Abraham tough it out on some rinky-dink boat, now did She?”) or which empire will be the next to fall (“My bet’s on Byzantine. Watch it topple like Rome did”).

Aziraphale keeps an eye on Crowley’s recovery, too. He continues to heal Crowley every couple of days, allowing time for him to recover from the brunt of miracling between sessions. His recovery slips backwards every now and then, a boil once gone protruding from his skin again only hours later, or the black on his hands creeping back up. Disease is a creeping vine, aggressive and perseverant, and this plague is no different. It only makes Aziraphale double down on his efforts. 

Crowley will not die. Aziraphale is a will in the world himself, fiercer than most when he puts his mind to it. So Crowley simply will not die, he decides. 

How unfortunate that his will is not alone.

It is on one of his market days that Aziraphale is jerked from his thoughts by a hand hard on his shoulder. “Aziraphale,” a man’s voice says, and the blood in Aziraphale veins goes still.

Aziraphale whips around, nearly dropping the loaf of bread in his arms. “Gabriel,” he says breathlessly. He straightens his posture reflexively, drops his chin lower to his chest as if bowing it. “What are you doing here?”

Gabriel is so completely out of place here in the market, dressed in robes rich enough for royalty though too simple for England’s currently installed monarch. Aziraphale feels embarrassingly underdressed in his linen tunic. He grimaces at what the humans must think of all this, then notices that no eyes fall on him, charmed instead to slip right off him and Gabriel. 

“Am I not allowed to pop by and see what all the hubbub is about?” Gabriel walks over to a market stall, picks up an apple, and makes a face at it before putting it back. “I’ll never understand what you see in Earth. It’s so… gross. And messy.”

“I suppose,” Aziraphale says slowly. “It took me some time myself, but… Well, I don’t mean to suggest anything by this, but I wonder if there isn’t more you have to say.” He bites on his tongue, fretful.

Gabriel stops pacing around the market and turns sharply to face Aziraphale. “Hm?” His face is unreadable.

“I only mean that you never seem to like it down here. And usually you only call on me for reports, and I’ve nothing to report, so --”

And then Gabriel laughs. It draws deeply from his stomach, as rumbling as the thunder in a summer storm. “You’re always so uptight, Aziraphale!” As if they were friends, Gabriel puts his arm around Aziraphale's shoulders and pulls him in close. His grip is just this side of too firm. “I’ve noticed you’re doing an awful lot of miracling for an angel with no current assignments.”

Aziraphale has to keep his breath steady. Looking straight ahead, he says, “Yes. I have.”

“What could you possibly be doing? I thought we’d already had this chat, keep the miracles to a minimum, right?”

Does he know? Aziraphale’s mind whirs in circles. “I’ve been healing.” He pauses, giving his mind time to catch up to his mouth. “I’ve been healing… plague victims.” And if not for the plurality, it would not be a lie at all. It eases the way for the rest of a cover story.

“Oh, that thing? Why would you do that?”

It does not take much of a lie to answer this. “Because they’re all suffering! I can’t stand to watch it.” 

Gabriel is silent behind him. Aziraphale sneaks a glance over his shoulder and sees the hard set of Gabriel’s mouth. 

“Oh no,” he says. “It’s not sanctioned by Heaven, is it?” A cold tendril of dread creeps along Aziraphale’s spine. 

But Gabriel’s voice breaks through like an ice pick. “No, it’s not.” Aziraphale nearly collapses with relief. “At least, I don’t think so.”

“What?” 

Uncertainty is not a good look on Gabriel. The angel scowls. “Look,” he says shortly. “We don’t really know where it came from. It certainly wasn’t an order from my office. Disease isn’t really my style. But it seems too grand to be something this planet cooked up for itself.”

“Do you… do you think She did it?”

Gabriel shrugs. “I was down here for the ten plagues, and I’m reminded of them now. With all the people it’s killed, it seems like one of those “rid the world of sin” kind of things. I just wish it’d hit my desk before rolling out,” he says, then quickly dogs at his own heels. “But the Ineffable Plan and all that, She would know better than me.” Gabriel smiles now, vacantly with too much teeth as if he’s practiced it.

It is a calculated move on Aziraphale’s part when he ventures to say, “Did you know it’s sent all the demons back Downstairs?”

The payoff is at least a little in the look of shock that spears Gabriel’s face. “Elaborate.”

“It’s what I said. They’ve all gone back to Hell,” except for one, he doesn’t say. “Apparently it’s killing them, too.”

“Huh.” Gabriel’s face seems to fall a little. He starts pacing around the market again. “I’d always thought the Final Battle would be, you know, an actual battle. But if the Almighty decrees biological warfare, Her Will shall be done.”

“On Earth as it is in Heaven,” Aziraphale murmurs. 

One of Gabriel’s hands grasps at his side as if in search of the sword he’d much rather have. “I better be off,” he says quickly, and in the same breath disappears. He says nothing more about Aziraphale’s rogue miracles, but Gabriel’s silence has never meant much. 

He races home to Crowley -- and when did he start thinking of Crowley’s ramshackle shack as home?

* * *

Crowley is on his back, flipping through one of the books Aziraphale had brought over to read to him, when Aziraphale comes bounding through the door. “You were gone for a while.” Crowley laughs. “What happened, you run into somebody or something?”

“Yes, actually,” Aziraphale says, out of breath. He’d run the whole way back to Crowley, looking over his shoulder just in case Gabriel decided he hadn’t said his whole piece. “Gabriel, actually.”

The book falls on Crowley’s face. “That bastard? Go- Sa- Somebody help us all, what’s he up to now?”

Aziraphale drops the loaf of bread on a side table and flops down in the only chair. He wipes the sweat from his hairline. “I’ve been doing too many miracles. The head office has noticed. He didn’t say too much about it, but I don’t think Gabriel was too happy about it.”

A stale quiet settles over the room. Crowley sits up now. He picks at his nail unconvincingly. “If it’s going to get you in trouble,” he begins to say, but then holds his tongue. 

Going ramrod straight, Aziraphale looks at Crowley long and hard. “We’ve talked about this,” he says simply.

“About what?”

“This whole… self-sacrifice thing. I told you I was going to heal you. This doesn’t change anything.”

“You heard what feather brains said, though.”

“And I’ll listen, like a good angel. Just… there might be a delay, is all.”

Crowley’s mouth twists into something mischievous. “What a rule-breaker you’ve become.”

“It’s not rule breaking! It’s…”

“It’s rule breaking. I would know.”

“Oh, hush you.” Aziraphale crosses to Crowley’s side. “In all seriousness, though, I can’t keep this up for long. I’m afraid he’ll come back if I keep doing this.”

“So we finish it up today, how’s that?” Aziraphale is startled by the open trust in Crowley’s speech, the way the demon’s eyes search for his and hold there. 

“It would hurt like, well, like the devil. You wouldn’t mind?”

Crowley shakes his head and stretches out flat for Aziraphale. “Lay it on me, angel.”

So Aziraphale does. 

He pours all of his might into healing, shutting out the sound of Crowley’s bitten-down wails, and when it is all done, Aziraphale comes back to himself. The demon under his hands goes still, blinks his eyes slowly, and sits up. Crowley’s skin is as smooth as the day it was corporated. The sheen of fever over his eyes is gone. 

“Nicely done, angel,” Crowley says. He smiles sweetly, and Aziraphale nearly melts. 

“Of course,” he says softly. He rolls up the sleeves of his tunic, picking at a fray thread. “I hope it’s not too forward,” he says, leaning in to embrace Crowley before the demon can protest. Crowley goes taut in his arms and Aziraphale nearly pulls away, but then Crowley’s arms come up too. And it’s nice. For as long as it can last, it’s nice.

They pull apart. “I’d better be off,” Aziraphale says before it can become too awkward. He reaches across Crowley to take his book back, then thinks better of it. He leaves it. Half the fun of book collecting is finding the books anyway, or so he tells himself. “I don’t know when I’ll see you again.”

Outside, the sun is beginning to set on London. It burns the sky deep swatches of red. How lovely, he thinks. He doesn’t have this kind of view from his house. 

Crowley doesn’t move from his spot on the pallet. He crosses his arms behind his head and reclines against the wall. “Oh, I’ll find you,” he says. “I always do, don’t I?”

“Yes, I suppose you do,” Aziraphale says, and leaves Crowley’s door open on his way out. And if it takes him longer to walk home than it should, he can blame it on watching the sunset.

**Author's Note:**

> Have I been sitting on this idea for months? Yes. Is it by more than sheer coincidence that I'm choosing to write this now? Also yes. Gotta sublimate all these feelings somehow, bb


End file.
